An Interview with Michael DeForge

“Is it too late to make a space for yourself?”

How Michael DeForge describes himself:
Awkward
Angry but also non-confrontational
Extremely Canadian

Midway through Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero, Michael DeForge’s comic about a sturdy-legged nature enthusiast attempting to make a new home for herself in a Canadian national park, an intruder appears. He’s wearing a plaid flannel button-down and a baseball cap, and introduces himself as journalist Michael DeForge. “Do you have any response to the allegations that you were involved in your father’s election fraud?” he asks Sticks. She promptly jabs him in the chin and he goes down so hard he gets stuck in the ground for months, until his muscles and bones wither to nothing. Eventually, Sticks returns to dig him out and he floats away, his body a spindly wisp of skin. “This will be great for my career as a journalist,” he says. It isn’t—he ends up lonely on a hospital bed, his story scooped by a local bear, penning vindictive gossip in a magazine column titled “Forest Tattler.”

In real life DeForge, like many self-deprecating humorists, is unassuming and sincere. He has published ten books and worked as a designer on the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time. His drawings consist of simple lines, flat perspective, and a limited palette of bright colors, but the worlds therein are a profusion of organic shapes that suggest a richness of interior emotion. Many of DeForge’s stories rely on the highly specific personalities and neuroses of the characters: a depressive snake, say, or a frog with cutthroat artistic ambition, or a spider and a squirrel who pose together to make a celebrity named Julianne Napkin. Those characters appear in DeForge’s most recent book, Leaving Richard’s Valley, published in April. It returns to many of the same themes as Sticks; both books center on a community of forest animals devoted to an idealistic human leader. But while Sticks Angelica is admirable for her classically Canadian attributes—fitness, outdoor skills, no-nonsense equanimity—Richard’s obsession with purity and wellness starts to take on a tinge of madness as the story goes on. Then a small cohort of Richard’s animal devotees flee to urban Toronto to build their own utopia.

I met DeForge last month at Russ & Daughters Cafe, in New York City’s Lower East Side. While he sipped on a shrub soda, I asked him about the process of drawing a daily comic strip, his anarchic vision of Toronto, and the meaning of utopia.

—Camille Bromley

I. “I feel extremely Canadian.”

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